HSE University Hosts Russia’s First Doctoral Defence in Cognitive Science

An international team of authors, including researchers at HSE University have examined decision-making by nationals of 11 countries. It turns out that people universally tend to make more mistakes when confronted with the need for quick decision-making and expected to weigh the pros and cons of available options on their own. However, when the advantages and disadvantages of each option are known to them, the behaviour of individuals from different nationalities varies depending on their cultural level of risk aversion. The paper has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

A new study by researchers at the HSE Language and Brain Centre and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences can change the current understanding of language acquisition in young children, revealing that the boundaries between typical performance and developmental disorders are not as clear-cut as previously believed. Having tested more than 100 Russian-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 7, the researchers discovered that some children diagnosed with developmental language disorders (DLD) performed on par with their peers who did not have speech and language diagnoses. The study has been published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

An international team of researchers, with the participation of scientists from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, studied how the choice of a foreign language affects human cognitive abilities. It turns out that languages greatly differing from one's native language stimulate cognitive function at the initial stage of their study, while those similar to the native language have a delayed effect and help the brain work more efficiently at a higher level of proficiency in a foreign language. The results of the study have been published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

The movement of human eyes mirrors the cognitive processes occurring in the brain. Today, neuroscientists can precisely monitor their parameters with millisecond accuracy. Video-oculography holds the key to understanding numerous phenomena related to reading, perception, and language production processes. IQ.HSE interviewed Andriy Myachikov, Leading Research Fellow at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), about the method of video-oculography, or, in scientific parlance, eye-tracking, and its applications in psycholinguistic research.

An international group of scientists including researchers from HSE University has proposed a novel approach to rehabilitating patients with motor disorders. According to the researchers, more effective recovery can be achieved by granting patients the freedom to choose their movements and providing an appropriate system of rewards for engaging in the prescribed exercises. The opinion paper has been published in Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair.

HSE researcher Frol Sapronov believes that doing science, for all its complexity and seriousness, should be fun. He told the HSE Young Scientists project how he researches dyslexia in adults and why he tries not to be offended by criticism of his work.

As a rule, people look immediately and automatically in the same direction when their companion or someone nearby suddenly turns their attention. And it seems rather obvious. In fact, joint attention is an ability that helps people in many areas, such as communication, collaborative activities, etc. But sometimes a person can be deprived of it. We analyse this phenomenon — what is joint visual attention, cases in which this mental function can be disrupted, and what remains a mystery for scientists — in IQ Card Index with the help of HSE researchers Tatiana Shevel and Maria Falikman.

HSE University researchers have discovered that false information in one’s native and second languages contribute equally to the formation of false memories. The study, entitled ‘False Memories in Native and Foreign Languages’, has beenpublished in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Attention mechanisms impact the perception of polysemous words, while shades of meaning are presented as a continuum in the mental lexicon.

In lockdowns, why do some people stay home, while others violate the quarantine rules and go out for picnics in the park? Behavioural economics may provide the answer to this question. Oksana Zinchenko, a Research Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains how we can predict people’s behaviour with game theory.